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The antiabortion crusade was successful despite the fact that only regular physicians publicly worked for it. They were not a particularly influential group, but they did have confident scientific knowledge on their side. Doctors had known since early in the century that the "quickening" distinction was without merit—that the development of the unborn child was gradual from the time of conception.

Some recent histories have commented on the quickening distinction as though it had preserved a right to abortion for women, but that is a classic case of imposing modern thinking on a historical situation. The law and common belief had always held that it was wrong to abort a child once it had life, after quickening. The doctors could presume that society's moral commitments would lead to the banning of abortion once enough people understood that life was at stake from the beginning.

Yet the success of the nineteenth-century crusade was short-lived. The life of an unborn child is easy to ignore—invisible and voiceless. The New York Times, which had led the press crusade to stop abortions in the 1870s, suddenly stopped reporting on it at all in 1896, when Adolph Ochs assumed ownership and introduced two new slogans: "All the News That's Fit to Print" and "It Does Not Soil the Breakfast Cloth." Abortion news was apparently not fit to print, for it did soil the breakfast cloth.

The National Police Gazette no longer crusaded against abortion either; it now took abortion ads. Other newspapers reported occasionally on lurid abortion cases, but journalism professor Olasky notes a change. In the late nineteenth century, press coverage often referred to abortion as the killing of unborn children. Stories in the twentieth century rarely mentioned the unborn; the focus was exclusively on the dangers of abortion to women.

Doctors also lost interest. By early in the twentieth century the AMA had regulated the irregulars (whose nineteenth-century abortion practices had threatened to take away patients and income from regular doctors) out of business, and had no more need to appeal to the legislature for the control of medical business. Doctors could regulate themselves—but showed little interest in interfering with the practices of their fellow regulars.

There was, therefore, no one to show an interest in the lives of the unborn. The American clergy never had. Sexual behavior grew more promiscuous in the Roaring Twenties, and perhaps the failure of Prohibition made America less interested in moral reform. The Soviet Union legalized and promoted abortion, to the acclaim of some. Population-control groups such as Planned Parenthood began cautiously and privately to favor abortion. So did some doctors, mainly on the basis of their claim to know what was best for the welfare of their patients without governmental interference.

Contrary to popular assertions, the number of women who died from "back-alley abortionists" was small; according to the Kinsey Report, 85 percent of abortions were done by doctors, and the number of annual deaths declined steadily, to an estimated 300 by 1967. The deaths were tragic whatever the number, but far more significant in putting abortion back on the public agenda was doctors' discomfort with the rigidity of the antiabortion laws.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about the beginning of the third abortion war was that it seemed to be about a relatively small change in the law—"abortion reform," as it was called. The "right to abortion" was not an issue, at least for women; if anyone's rights were at stake, they were the doctor's. In 1959 the prestigious American Law Institute (ALI) published a new "model code" for state legislatures. It would allow a doctor to perform abortions in cases of rape, incest, serious deformity, and whenever the doctor believed there was risk to the mental or physical health to the mother. The word believed was significant, because it meant a doctor was virtually immune from prosecution so long as he would claim, whatever the medical facts, that he had believed them threatening. Few imagined that such terminology could become an open door to abortion on demand.

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47